Please get Unstuck

January 14, 2014

>We have these brief lives, and our only real choice is how we will fill them. Your attention is precious. Don’t squander it. Don’t throw it away. Don’t let companies and products steal it from you. Don’t let advertisers trick you into lusting after things you don’t need. Don’t let the media convince you to covet the lives of celebrities. Own your attention — it’s all you really have.

In the tradeoff between timeliness and timelessness, choose the latter. The zeitgeist rewards timeliness, but your soul rewards timelessness. Work on things that will last.

Jonathan Harris has long been an inspirational figure. We Feel Fine beautifully told stories with data, before data visualization became a popular form and is still creatively relevant today. Finding new tools, new techniques to tell stories, personal stories, bigger stories, everyone's stories seemed to be his thing and it was always exciting to see what he'd turn his talent to next.

So I read this piece with a mixture of poignancy and hope. Sadness that he has not been in the most fertile of places of late, but hope that the clarity he has found translates into happiness and creativity. I'll be looking out for beautifully told stories at his site.